


The Relentless Weight

by FeuillesMortes



Category: 15th Century CE RPF, Henry VI - Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 3 - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Teen Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:29:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28446939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeuillesMortes/pseuds/FeuillesMortes
Summary: After fleeing England following the Battle of Tewkesbury, a freshly widowed Anne Neville must convince Queen Margaret of Anjou to make a difficult decision. The future of her daughter depends on how skillfully she will be.
Relationships: Edward of Lancaster | Prince of Wales & Marguerite d'Anjou | Margaret of Anjou, Marguerite d'Anjou | Margaret of Anjou & Anne Neville Queen of England
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9
Collections: Histories Ficathon XI





	The Relentless Weight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [branloaf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/branloaf/gifts).



PRIEURÉ DE SAINT-MARTIN  
Harfleur, France  
July 1472

A heavy hammering sound boomed, time and time again, across the vaulted places of Saint-Martin, the unhurrying effort of decades advancing, hit by hit, in its slow rhythm and weight. Those frowning stonemasons were the same ones in place since the times of King Charles VII, Anne could swear it, they had been labouring under the same spell — clad in the same rough clothes, bathed in the same light rays — and would only ever be freed once all the renovations celebrating the English defeat in Normandy had been completed and perfected. Summer-sweating faces, brows drawn together in deep concentration: a sort of relentless promise to God, time running out, or perhaps, a pact, a lost wager to the devil. Anne had no itching wish to find out what came to pass in holy places like Saint-Martin after dark, solemn empty halls where silence was as haunting and chilling as noisy steps near one’s bed far gone into the night. Every time before sleep, Anne would say her prayers and lock the heavy oak door that led to her rooms, keeping inside not only her chambermaids, but also Jane, the wetnurse, and more important than them all, her infant child. The nights were sharp and full of black teeth; Anne waited for them to wane into the peach platitudes of dawn.

She could have stayed in a far quieter place than one overcrowded with stonemasons and singing monks. For one, they could have lodged at the Hôpital des Portugais on their way to Queen Margaret’s childhood home in Anjou. They _could_ have, that was, if only Anne’s dear mother — how strange still to say it after all those months, how funny and unwieldy still it lay on her tongue — had not been so adamant in lodging at the monastery of Saint-Martin. Anne briefly wondered whether Margaret held any desire to take the veil now that they had learnt what had been done to King Henry, God rest his soul, but she understood the late queen’s reasoning after a time. She always did, if Anne would only force her mind to stop lurching forward for the hot sizzling of a moment. Harfleur’s only decent inn was too known, too well-watched, too under scrutiny for a small armed party, part English and part Scottish, not to draw unwanted attention. King Edward’s informants could be anywhere at all, and the biggest port city in Normandy would certainly be a choice. Yet, the number of people coming and going through the town’s walls would lend them anonymity, Margaret had said it in her turn, so the best way to avoid the lion would be to scurry right next to his flat paws.

Anne might have been united to a queen she did not quite understand but all the rest of her family was sea-miles away. The living members of her family — what was left of it, the husk and the shell — and the dead and buried deep in England’s soil as well. The dispatches they had received after arriving in Scotland had not been clear enough: had her father gone unmourned, after all? The great Earl of Warwick, he who had made and unmade kings, the mind which Edward of Rouen could never have gone without? Evidently, cousin Edward _could_ go without her father, at least with help from Burgundy and the love of a people who did not wish for a feeble-minded king to sit on the throne any longer. Anne’s father had gambled, had played like he had done so many times before at cards — congenial, savvy, drawing the handsome smile of a cat luring prey into a trap — and had, unexpectedly, lost it all. A bad play of the hand, an unlucky set of cards like it often happened to the most experienced of players in life. Anne could imagine her father just now across the card table, shrugging not quite apologetically, unrepentant. _None other than God will make me say that I was wrong._

Isabel had always boasted of their father’s preference but Anne knew it to be the opposite: Father had married her to a Crown prince, had he not, and now thanks to cousin Edward’s recently arrived heir, Isabel’s husband would never be king. A perfidious man, her dear brother was, all mellifluous words and singing but no sound substance to ground him. Perhaps Anne had spent much too time with Queen Margaret already, but if she were ever to see Clarence again — he who had sold her father and husband so cheaply, so cowardly — she would raise her little hands (her _white little hands_ , as her late husband had called them, little hands so pristine and immaculate, like a saint’s) and sneak them around her dear brother’s neck, tighten her grip to choke and steal his breath away with a twist and a squeeze of her fingers.

At times at night, Anne would chew on her lip so hard she would taste blood. She would follow every ridge and crack of her skin with a glide of her tongue, would taste the iron-sharp tang of war, those points dull and stinging, and pretend the blood she welcomed in her mouth was Clarence’s rather than her own. _Poor Isabel, tied forever to Father’s traitor_. After a great many losses, it was comforting still to find wounds to scratch and pick at, scabs to pull and aches to dwell on, yet all of Anne’s scars were hidden inside the body. Faint whispering doubts had lately started to rope around her heart like the stems of some treacherous ivy. Perhaps her hatred had been misplaced: cousin Edward had been the one to allow Anne’s father to be dragged and humiliated across the bloody field of Barnet, he had been the one to allow her sire to be maimed and mocked and mowed onto the ground.

Tried now under the same fire, Queen Margaret and Anne were united by a common hatred, a common loss, and a common goal. Her husband the Prince of Wales might have been no more but he had left Anne with child — _their_ child, a beautiful little girl, one that looked exceedingly like the father she would never know: all warm, round eyes, thin plumes of fine silky brown hair. Not to mention also a queer, contemplative pout that at times would look too severe in such a small child: Anne’s September blessing, grace, saving rope and anchor. Memories of Anne's childhood would flash across her mind, the gauze of her mother’s hennin falling over her father’s velvet hat, their heads bent over papers and conspiring together. Even Christ had had Saint Joseph in His time; no child should ever grow fatherless. Blissfully unaware and cradled in her childhood, Anne’s little girl did not know they were united in more ways than just the ties of childbirth, both of them left to endure without a father, both of them left destitute of Prince Edward’s company, guidance and inheritance. Anne had been robbed of more than just her dower as Princess of Wales or the dream to ever be queen.

 _Why can’t I hold onto that memory,_ she would ask herself at times, _why can't I cling to the picture of that hopeful prince, the son vowing to restore his father’s throne under a starlit sky?_

Anne would not sit and commiserate. Her mother had taught her better than just weep and wail and grow idle and insipid. On that last day, hours before crossing the channel back to England, Father had promised her she would get everything she had ever wanted, but now all Anne wished for was to live. To live, and thrive, and avenge. Though her childhood had become an immense sheet of darkening water, one where memories floated like wrecked ships, receding farther and farther away from the shore each month since her pregnancy, Anne considered her options carefully and spun them around her fingers. Her father had gambled and lost, and Anne had always been much brasher than him — moonchild, he had called her, his mercurial girl — but she also liked to think of herself as orderly and practical. She flattened the letter she was holding against her wool dress and listened to the low dragging of her breathing. There was still time. Still time to win. 

Her hesitation was short-lived. Once the bells calling for Vespers had ceased, Anne left one of her servants at the door to stop any possible interruption and slipped inside Queen Margaret’s rooms without much ceremony. The time for court etiquette was long gone; those wooden but polished manners had all but faded during their flight to Scotland, not the first time the late queen had resorted to such action. Still, Anne trod the floor with light steps. Ominous and loud her steps rang in the quiet now that the stonemasons had retired from their work, immensely heavy they sounded without those distant sounds of monks singing. Anne peered from between the arras, her hands lightly brushing the monastery’s rather simple choice of lambswool: Margaret was kneeling on her prie-dieu, one they said she had been carrying around since her time as queen of England. 

Those were austere rooms, certainly, made even more austere by the rawness, the nakedness of the stones of that ever-expanding monastery. There was no stained glass yet to adorn those arched windows letting in the day’s last rays of sunlight that stretched and reached towards Anne’s feet. The hour was late, the heatless light deepened and blunted all edged surfaces into a crowned and suffused atmosphere, and Margaret’s voice rose and fell around hushed words like a child’s. For once Margaret didn’t hold herself straight, stiff-backed as she usually was, but bent towards the cushioned armrest, at once both Lazarus and his dogs, forever busy licking her wounds. Hers was the curved arch of a weeping willow ending on the prayer beads that shivered between her fingers.

“...Grant us through the intercession of Thy holy virgin and martyr Margaret,” The words of the late queen swelled and deflated, rose and fell. “Undauntedly to confess the Faith, carefully to observe the chastity of our state of life, and to overcome the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and thereby escape the punishments of eternal damnation…”

It was the eleventh of July: the start of the novena to Saint Margaret of Antioch. Anne should have known how her new mother would be occupying her time that evening. She had seen the queen devotions during the last year’s novena. The queen’s patron saint was not that holy English Margaret who had done so much good for Scotland, no. It could only ever be the _other_ Margaret, a much older saint plucked from the dawn ages of Christianity: the slayer of dragons, she who had crushed the devil with her hammer, the very Margaret that had emerged from the bowels of the enemy unscathed, spotless, Invicta.

There was a surprising hint of unguarded weakness in the tone and rhythm Queen Margaret uttered her invocation now, as if fortitude was a heavy cargo she had been carrying on her back for too long and now laid at the saint’s feet like an offering: Margaret’s own banner and battle helmet offered at the altar pleading for a much-needed victory over her enemies. Remote and vulnerable, never had the queen looked so alien and ancient, all that was left of something difficult to understand now, an otherness Anne would never know. The letter’s texture felt rough against her fingertips as Anne waited, shifting her weight from foot to foot. What else was there to take up arms against?

Queen Margaret finished her prayer but stood kneeling on her prie-dieu for an imprecise amount of time, rosary beads dangling from her fingers. The enamelled beads clashed against each other, they wavered in the air, brought together and then pushed apart, tinkling sweet melodies.

“Did you know, Anne,” The queen started, uttering her words without rising or turning her head. “Saint Margaret of Antioch was one of the three saints to speak with la Pucelle d’Orléans.”

Anne almost took a step back. Queen Margaret had heard her coming — had known it was _her_ coming — despite Anne’s efforts at silence or the white wimple covering the queen’s ears. There was certainly cause for bemusement in the way Queen Margaret addressed Anne now: what a strange start of a conversation to pronounce the name of her late husband’s very enemy in France! After all that time, was cousin Edward right in declaring Queen Margaret to have divided loyalties, ever more French, more foreigner, than queen of England? Would she have handed over all of the remaining English territories to the French king given the chance?

Anne raised her chin, unwilling to let Margaret know she had surprised her, her voice as steady as it could be. “Three saints, Your Grace says. May I know the other two?”

Margaret crossed herself, brought the rosary’s silver crucifix to her lips before pulling herself to her feet. “Saint Catherine most pure, of course.” She brushed her skirts. “And Holy Michael the Archangel.” She turned to face her dear daughter, one eyebrow raised slightly higher than the other. “You do know Saint Michael was Edward’s favourite saint, don’t you?”

 _No,_ Anne replied in her head, _but I should have_. Indeed, Anne should have known her late husband’s choice of saint. Saint Michael, the warrior angel, most beloved of his father’s messengers, leader of His army, he who had expelled the forces of evil from Heaven and squashed the devil under his sword and feet. Now, if only Prince Edward had done the same to those occupying his father’s home and throne! If only his sword hand had been as steady, his strike as sure and true against his enemies.

“Yes.”

Her reply was hushed in a single breath, her chest deflating slowly. She had lied, but Anne would never admit to having hardly known her husband in their short time together. The queen’s dark eyes hovered over her face in their surgical assessment, searching for a point of weakness, perhaps, or trying to discern traces of falsehood and betrayal. Margaret blinked once, she blinked twice; her gaze softened, blurred, lost its sharp clawing edge. Anne’s ribcage grew full, expanded, and relaxed. The storm of Margaret’s scrutiny had passed.

If once the queen’s eyes had burnt fiercely and brightly like some great forest fire, since the deaths of Prince Edward and King Henry they resembled nothing but two lumps of cold coal. They were still rather hard, courageous eyes, but the queen had grown so thin there were dark lines between the different bones of her neck and shoulders; her face had become drawn and pale. To Anne, Queen Margaret had always looked like some great stone woman, what with her black stare and sharp cheekbones and sculpted square jaw. She had been unmovable in her goals once, possessor of an iron will perfected over years of unyielding hunger and struggle. The queen at present looked more like a common statue, a church gargoyle, rather than an ancient Roman deity fixed on stone or some fierce Diana of old. 

That day in Tewkesbury, when they received the news of the prince’s death, the queen had fixed her eyes on a spot on the floor so intensely it had verged on the point of paralysis. None had dared to talk to the queen then despite the urgency of their flight, neither had they tried to touch her or rouse her attention. After the flush of a moment that felt more like an eternity, Margaret had risen from her chair, her hands clenched into fists by her sides and a stream of quick silent tears racing down her cheeks. She had walked ahead without nary a glance around her, had closed the door to her rooms as if on a trance. Not able to wait any longer, they had found the queen sat on the tiled floor, speaking incoherently. Puffy-eyed and stubborn in her simmering rage, she had fallen into a sort of fiery numbness. Death seemed just like another enemy to that queen, one to whom she refused to submit. She would go on and on, it seemed, on and on until there was nothing else in the world left to be destroyed.

The room filled with a reddish light called dusk. Presently, Margaret left her place by the prie-dieu and wearily let herself down onto a chair. She brushed the ends of her sleeves, her gown the colour of the dark between two shores. She pressed her lips together very tightly and held herself very cautiously: whatever memories she was revisiting, she would not reveal them to a young lady, not even the widow of her only son. Anne tried to decide whether she should wait or just go ahead and show the letter she had finished on the day before. It was an imprecise sort of feeling: it certainly wasn’t _fear_ , for nothing could hurt Anne more than grief had already done.

“I have prayed to Saint Margaret for you,” Margaret said, looking straight ahead of herself, at the soft crescents and diamonds of sunshine that receded across the wall. “Last year, as soon as you told me of it, as soon as you told me there was... a chance.” The queen paused, let out a slow, depressed sigh. “When I was a child I was told Saint Margaret was a great deliverer of pregnant women in danger.” 

From the slight rigidity that came over her face, one could see the queen did not dwell on particularly pleasant thoughts. Anne kept her quiet, not taking the seat Margaret had pointed to her but choosing to remain on her feet. The queen licked her lips, folded her hands together before she straightened her back in a clean motion and spoke in a much stronger voice. 

“I must say I did not expect you to survive. Either you or the child, I was convinced one of you would perish, or both. Your sister’s child didn’t survive, did it? It could have hardly been encouraging at the time.” There was a touch of irony or malice in her voice now, and Anne wondered whether it was directed at her father, at Clarence, or at herself. “You were so young then.” The queen pursed her lips — almost disapprovingly, one could say, if they didn’t know her any better. “You are so young still.”

No, Anne was never supposed to have fallen pregnant. The queen had been adamant on keeping Anne and her son from sharing a bed like true husband and wife, but she had not prevented the consummation of their marriage from taking place. Anne was uncertain whether she could call it a miracle, or even a misfortune, but it sufficed that one time for her belly to grow round with child. 

She had never known greater fear, neither had she experienced such a strong and bone-deep chill before: for months, every time Anne closed her eyes Isabel’s flushed face and her child’s lifeless body would jump into the secret spaces of her mind. Yet for a time there had been hope in the depths of the late queen’s eyes, a hope that was soon to be replaced by disappointment and dissatisfaction at the birth of a small girl, one that had seemed unlikely to be long-lived. Anne’s daughter had already proved she was a survivor most of all: none could deny that the same unyielding hunger that lived in the late queen also flowed in her child’s veins.

Perhaps Margaret would go on watching the play of shadows and light cast on the walls, the soft spots of light fading, imprecisely fidgeting with her rosary beads, but Anne placed herself directly across from the queen’s field of vision.

“I must thank Saint Margaret in this novena, then.” Anne crossed her arms at the wrist, searching the older woman’s eyes with what she hoped was a serious but earnest look. “I am most certain now I owe her my life.”

Queen Margaret half-smiled. “At the christening, why do you think I insisted on naming the child Margaret?” Her half-smile bloomed into a short chuckle. “After myself?” Gradually, bitterly, the smile cracked and fell. “All these years and it has never been about myself. Never.”

 _Never._ Such a definite word. People never admitted to being ambitious for their own sake, did they? Yet for Margaret it had never been about ambition, Anne supposed, but the unrelenting drive of justice: one’s due place in the right order of things. Margaret was the daughter and niece of kings and queens, Margaret was—she had been—an anointed queen. Anne might have still been seeking her own place in God’s greater scheme of things, but she would fight for her child’s rights before anything else.

“I am glad Her Grace has mentioned our little Margaret.” Anne sweetened her pitch and toyed with her words carefully, testing their usefulness on the tip of her tongue. “For I’ve come to decide her future this evening.”

Queen Margaret regarded her curiously, head tipped down, out of the corner of her eyes. “Speak plainly, child. Say what you’ve come to say.”

With a quick motion and flick of her wrist, Anne placed her letter inside the queen’s hands. “I have taken the liberty of writing it myself.”

“What’s this?” Margaret demanded at once as she unfolded the parchment. “Who is this for?”

“King Edward.”

The queen only issued a vague, displeased but imprecise hum. She pressed her lips together into a thin hard line and made no reply, eyes sternly focused on the letter. Anne had taken an enormous gamble by calling her cousin king. Most of the Lancastrian loyal men had never consented to call him so, as Anne had come to understand. The earl of Pembroke, the king's brother, and the Duke of Exeter only ever referred to him as ‘March’, her cousin’s old title and earldom, and Queen Margaret herself only called him ‘the usurper’. That the queen had not raised her eyebrows at Anne calling him ‘King Edward’ thrilled, scared and saddened her at once.

It did not take long for the queen to finish reading the letter. In a second, Margaret lifted her gaze from the page with a decidedly bilious look. “Is this a jape?” 

_There_. The outburst Anne had so anticipated. 

“Do you jest, is that it? Must I call in the maids now, girl—” Her voice grew two tones louder, exceedingly acid. “—and have them bedeck your head with little bells and shiny trinkets, shall I, so you may perform your tricks and antics for the monks tonight?”

Anne hardened her stance, drew her eyebrows together into a grim expression of her own. Queen Margaret must have forgotten she was talking to the daughter of the great Earl of Warwick.

“I have never been more serious in my life, madam. King Edward has a son, we have a daughter. Together they can rule over England as the true heirs of York and Lancaster. All we are in need of is your signature and seal in the letter.”

The queen laughed a hollow sound, the far cry of a bird of prey: at once startling and joyless. “You must have an empty head if you think the usurper of my husband’s crown will accept his granddaughter for his heir.”

As she rose from her seat, the queen all but threw the letter at Anne who took pains to catch it before it spiralled down to the floor. From that most ungracious position, almost folded in two, Anne allowed herself to bellow her frustration.

“Must Your Grace give up on my daughter’s birthright so easily?”

“ _Birthright_ , you speak?” The queen turned to Anne with squinting eyes. “This is England we speak of, girl! England! That kingdom never accepted Matilda in her time, yes, I’ve been taught that much! Me, the _great laboured woman_ , the adulteress, the evil virago!” Her chest heaved, her nostrils flared. “Me, the—” Margaret stopped, ran a hand across her mouth and nose. In a much more subdued voice, she spoke again. “The Englishmen have never loved me. Never, from the start. The Englishmen have never loved—they have never loved my _son_ enough to crown him. No, they decided to give his crown to York instead!” She blinked hard for a few times, her eyes two great moths edging towards the light. “And now you come here, deceitful or childishly naïve, daring to say those same Englishmen will take off their hats and bow to my son’s daughter? I must laugh!”

Not for the first time, Anne could see reason in the queen’s protest, but she was not prepared to lose that fight. Her father would never be so; he would engage in every possible argument there was. Anne, who so far had aimed at the queen’s head, shot at her heart. 

“Is it because she's a girl that Your Grace will not fight, then? Do you seek to punish her for her sex by depriving her of her inheritance?”

“ _I_ am not the one depriving her of anything! Not I! God knows what I would give to see her crowned!” Queen Margaret, roused like a tigress, advanced towards Anne now, shoulders hunched in her bloody tragedy, garbed in her widow’s fury. “You don’t know me, girl! You don’t know about my family, my ancestors, you know nothing about nothing! I will fight to the day of my death. Nay, to the day of the Last Judgement!” Her eyes shone fiercely like in old times. “Men should not fear the injustice of the world, I say, but the _justice_ of God.” 

Staring at the queen’s rekindled fury, it was not difficult for Anne to imagine Margaret as one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, an avenging figure riding through the night directly out of Saint John’s Book of Revelation. Day of reckoning, _Dies Irae._

 _When the Judge his seat attaineth,  
_ _And each hidden deed arraigneth,  
_ _Nothing unavenged remaineth._

The queen grew quiet, she looked down and mumbled, almost to herself. “My granddaughter has no army.” That revelation seemed to strike her, or maybe she had already realised it long ago, only speaking it aloud now made the truth that much harder. She grimaced, face frozen in an expression between contempt and grief. “Jasper won’t be of help now, neither will Exeter. They’re both beyond my reach now.” Her rosary beads rolled between her fingers in a strange litany of loss. “Buckingham is gone. Somerset is gone. Shrewsbury is gone. Suffolk. Ned. Henry. No one left to fight—”

“King Edward does not know any of this.” Anne stopped her before the queen lost herself in the past, that terrible vault of the heart. “All he knows is that in twelve, fourteen, sixteen years, _someone_ will marry our Margaret and claim the crown in her name. We can wait that long or we can give her kingdom back to her _now_.” Anne tried a smile, but the motion didn’t grow root in her cheeks. “Would it not be more merciful to let Margaret have a peaceful childhood and honourable upbringing in a royal household in England, her father’s own dear realm?”

Margaret’s lips twitched; her whole body seemed constrained by the workings of her mind. “That man you call king—” Her voice wavered, just slightly. She seemed to be vibrating in place as she forced out the words from her mouth with great effort. “—That... _man._ That man killed my son and my husband. He and his father have taken everything that was ever dear to me.” The queen made a face of pure disgust and loathing, bit down on her lip. “Now you propose to offer my son’s daughter to him— _that man_ —on a silver plate. You mean to ship her away like a meek sheep to the slaughter!” Her eyes quickly swam with tears. “Well, _I_ will not let it! I will not, do you hear me?” The tears rolled steadily down her face without any attempt from the queen to stop their flow, as if she did not even know she was crying. “I will not let—How dare you? How _dare_ you?” 

The queen’s righteous indignation was extinguished within a second, as if a strong wind had blown across the room. Margaret didn't throw herself, she collapsed to the floor with balled fists. She struck it as she let out a deep painful howl, struck it again and again. There were no words to be identified, only incoherent sounds. She seemed to want to claw her way into the very heart of the earth. 

Anne did not feel disturbed, but oddly enough at immense peace. She crouched next to Margaret and placed her hands around the queen’s shoulders to lift her up, yet Margaret made no effort to help her in her difficult endeavour. She kept on weeping—wailing—and Anne had nothing to do for a while but hold the relentless weight of her. Subdued and mollified in the past year, Anne had never seen the queen in such a state or had heard such loud sobs coming from her. The queen’s grief had been invisible, it seemed, if only because so ravenous and merciless it had been ravaging her from the inside, in silence.

Margaret wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Her wimple had been displaced during her fall and now it displayed unruly wisps of dark hair on her right temple. She sniffled and took a long look at Anne in the last of the light, staring at her squarely with scarcely any movement of her features.

“She is everything that is left to me,” Margaret uttered at last. She seemed to be speaking from someplace far away, someplace at the bottom of the ocean, waves rolling over her head. “There is no one else left to me. No one.”

How many people in the world didn't also crave an attachment, anything to cling to life?

In the semi-darkness, Anne regarded the traces of fading youth in the queen’s face, the lines that had been drawn many times by pain and pleasure, rage and joy, carved around her mouth and eyes. Without surprise or disgust, she realised she did not pity her. _Motherhood has not made me kinder, but harsher_. She saw everyone’s vices and flaws clearly as she did the queen’s now, and it felt dishonest to her heart not to take notice of them. What had happened to the Anne of the past, her father’s moonchild? Sweet Nan, Gentle Anne, _Anne of the white hands_ , her late husband would say. _She died_ , her heart in its turn replied. Whether she had died after the death of her father or that of her husband, Anne did not know, but she had been dragging the corpse of her old self ever since the birth of her child.

“Margaret is all I have as well,” Anne stated without hesitation. “She is as much dear to me as she is to Your Grace.” _Dearer_ , she should say, if only she had enough courage. “She is so supremely dear to me, my most entirely beloved child, I must ensure she is safe. Does Your Grace not agree? What better way to keep her safe than between the paws of that very lion that would set his hungry eyes on her from afield?”

The queen drew her lips together in a tight, contrarian pout. “He will never do it. That man will never accept Margaret as his heir's bride.”

Anne pushed the letter into the queen's hands. “There is but one way to know his mind.”

They kept silent for a moment. Silence seemed to have fallen upon the whole world like a heavy tapestry blocking out the sun. They did not ask for the maids to come and light the candles but sat quiet and wordless as they watched the night come washing up towards them on their dismal shore of silence. Outside, the black sky weighed vast and starless on the windows. On the morrow, it would rain.

“Why must it be me?” Margaret said after an infinite moment, eyes closed. “Why must I be the one to sign this…” _Death sentence_ , Anne could almost hear her say. “... proposal?”

“Your Grace is King Edward’s greatest enemy at large. It must come from you, else he might not take it seriously.” Anne was insistent. “One must not think of pride now.”

Margaret turned her hands over and over in her lap as if she could see them, as if she could read inscriptions on the palms of her hands. Slowly, the queen unfolded Anne’s letter. “Of course I am disgustingly bitter.” Her hands smoothed the parchment flat against her lap. Her eyes, unseeing, stared in the dark. “Lord knows it is a beastly thing to be.”

Anne understood that was the chance she might not ever be given again. She was quick to rise and call in the maid waiting at the door. She proceeded to instruct a page to run and bring them some ink, wax, quill, and a writing desk. When she led the page into the room, the maid had already lit all of the candles and Margaret had retrieved her sealer — one of the last signs of her queenly office, one she had commissioned during her previous ten-year exile — from a locked bronze box. She was holding it carefully in her hands, turning it from side to side. 

“I do not need a writing desk.” Queen Margaret called from her side. “It is but my signature and my seal which this letter lacks, is it not?” Anne was about to reply that the queen was free to do as she chose, but Margaret spoke faster. “I do, however, have something to ask of you.”

Slowly, Anne understood the late queen was in want of no writing supply. Dismissing the servants, both women watched them go in silence when their eyes, not by coincidence but by understanding, met. If there was one thing that Anne had come to understand since her first flight from England two years before, was that the acquiring of power required a certain dose of submission.

“What is it, Your Grace?”

Margaret placed her sealer down on the very desk she had disdained, sending the attached candle into waves of light. “I want you to promise me you shall never marry again.”

“No.”

A grim short silence. Perhaps it was the first time Anne had ever denied a request from the queen. What Anne also understood now, however, was that by exercising power through Margaret their positions had been reversed. In that specific moment of time and space, Anne was the queen and Margaret the supplicant.

Not to be rebuked, the late queen frowned. “I am not asking you to take the veil or go into a nunnery. What I desire is for you to make a widow's vow of chastity.”

Their eyes crossed together. Both women looked down at the sealer standing upright on the desk.

“You must know I cannot afford such a course of action." Anne tried. "If my daughter is to be safe, then perhaps it will be required of me to make a profitable, or worthy, alliance.”

Margaret should have devised it from Anne’s stony expression and tone of voice, or even by her deliberate dropping of the queen’s formal address, but she stepped towards the dark gap that stood between them. Wordlessly moving, as she shifted around the desk her face fell into a pool of candlelight. In that play of illuminations and shadows, her face was handsome, even terrible. 

“Remarry, then. Go on to have more children and castles and treasures. Yet this much I must ask of you now.” Undeterred, the queen set her jaw tightly. “I want you to make a solemn vow to me now—under the risk of the damnation of your soul—” Her voice became graver, deeper. Her lips were hardly moving. “—to never marry any of the murderers of my son.” She didn't back down, she didn't blink. “This much I must demand. No one close to the usurper or associated with my son's murder.”

The black gap between them grew with immense thickness. One could swim across it, or drown in it. Margaret and Anne regarded each other from two opposite shores of light.

“Yes.” Anne swallowed, but it did next to nothing to alleviate the raspiness of her throat. “I shall not.”

She should have elaborated further on her promise, but at that moment, Anne could not stop the great leaps of her heart that throbbed and galloped up to her mouth. She did not believe he had been involved, but could it be possible that Queen Margaret had seen the letters Anne exchanged with her cousin the Duke of Gloucester? _No, it was impossible._ Anne had burnt them all. In those months in Scotland, friendless and hopeless, Richard had shown himself to be willing to act against his brother Clarence. Providing for her child’s future was one thing, but there could be no other way for Anne to avenge her father’s death. Queen Margaret would never understand — Anne could not sacrifice her strong wish for Clarence’s disgrace over what he had done to her father. It was necessary, mandatory even; revenge was a weapon that only survived by sharpening. Nothing unavenged could remain.

“Very well,” Margaret conceded, and Anne recovered fast enough from her spell to hand over a quill to the queen before she changed her mind yet again. 

“By signing this letter Your Grace is bringing us back from extinction.” 

Surprisingly, there was much hope in the words Anne spoke now. It had crept in her voice, treacherously and unexpectedly, despite reason and fear. Grief was not a shallow grave, Anne knew as much, but perhaps there was still a way to climb out of it: that was to be the day of their resurrection. Anne too had been the temporary saviour rescuing another. 

So at last, step after step, Margaret approached Anne's letter. At that moment, she gathered much strength in her stance: her chest was high and proud, her heart laid out open to the whole world to see. It demanded a special type of courage from anyone in her position to ever be hopeful again, but Margaret had always been nothing if not brave.

“Another Queen Margaret.” The late queen murmured, and pressed her quill to the letter.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> *
> 
> Historical Note:
> 
> * I couldn't find out exactly where Margaret of Anjou stayed during the Battle of Tewkesbury (we do know that she rode north with the Lancastrian army, though, as far as I understand). All I could find was that she stayed 'in a religious house'. Given that in this AU Anne Neville was pregnant, I don't think Margaret would have stayed too close to the battle as, for example, Tewkesbury Abbey. I had to leave it in an ambiguous note, but assume that they fled to Scotland from there.
> 
> A very happy new year for my giftee 🥺💖


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